DON LISI PARMI SES CONTEMPORAINS: NOTE SULLA RICEZIONE PRIMONOVECENTESCA DELL’OPERA DI CAPUANA IN FRANCIA

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the reception of Luigi Capuana’s work by his French contemporaries. It also provides an analysis of the significant differences that emerge, both in terms of receptive aesthetics and hermeneutical exploration between the French and the Italian critical approaches to Capuana’s work, with a specific focus on Le marquis de Roccaverdina (translated from the Italian by Mlle Douësnel and published in 1903 in the “Minerva” collection of the Parisian publisher Fontemoing). The French critique seems to avoid the particularly insistent approach of the Italian critics, who stress a parallel between the work of Capuana and that of Zola. On the contrary, the French critics follow an approach of a ‘separatist’ kind, recognising the distinctive characteristics of the two authorial individualities. From this perspective, Capuana appears to be, first and foremost, a multifaceted writer, an experimenter of diverse themes and topics and, as such, an author who would hardly fit into any single – inevitably restrictive – ‘school’ label.